The small businesses that took on President Donald Trump’s “reciprocal” tariff regime last year are back for another round, having filed lawsuits on Friday with the Court of International Trade over the administration’s latest round of duties.
Learning Resources, an Illinois-based toy company, and Burlap & Barrel, a New York-based spice importer, along with a handful of other small-to-medium-sized enterprises from across the country, represent the Davids to the government’s Goliath, the United States Trade Representative (USTR). The enterprises swiftly sued the federal government over the Section 301 duties imposed on Friday, just hours after they were announced.
Burlap & Barrel’s complaint came through the Liberty Justice Center, the same legal advocacy group that took on Trump’s International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) duties in 2025. The businesses argued in their respective lawsuits that the USTR failed to satisfy the rules established by Congress before levying duties worth between 10 percent and 12.5 percent on imports from 60 countries.
Under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, the USTR is authorized to investigate the actions, policies and practices of a foreign government that it deems discriminatory or restrictive to U.S. commerce. With all the boxes checked on statutory requirements, the USTR can take action—including by leveraging tariffs—to stop the foreign actor from perpetrating the offense.
But the lawsuits filed allege that Trump’s USTR, led by Ambassador Jamieson Greer, failed to follow legal protocol or precedent. Congress didn’t give the USTR the authority to carry out its own, “predetermined” tariff policy without adequately demonstrating how and why a practice negatively impacts U.S. commerce and explaining how the tariff will address the issue, the Liberty Justice Center wrote.
This application of Section 301 powers is highly unusual. The federal government took on 60 economies at once, conducting separate but concurrent investigations into whether their governments failed to impose or adequately enforce bans on imports made with forced labor. After just five months of investigations, the USTR completed dozens of probes and imposed a tariff program that covers over 99 percent of U.S. imports.
In the estimation of the plaintiffs, USTR neglected to adequately justify the targeting of each particular economy, choosing instead to blanket them all in basically uniform tariffs that even cover goods that have been found to have no connection to forced labor. The government’s trade arm acted “arbitrarily and capriciously,” the Liberty Justice Center wrote, by painting the economies with the same broad brushstroke and enacting identical enforcement measures across the board.
The distinction between the targeted trading partners is essential to recognize, according to the suit. Plaintiff Burlap & Barrel, for example, sources spices from across the globe, including from countries like Vietnam, Guatemala, Tanzania, Turkey and France—all of which have very different economies and workforce conditions. What’s more, these spices can’t be sourced domestically, making it necessary to partner with offshore suppliers.
The filing also asserted that the outcome of the Section 301 investigations was a foregone conclusion, not the result of genuine exploration, given administration officials’ own statements in recent months that the defunct IEEPA tariffs, invalidated by the Supreme Court in February, would be reconstituted through other tariff statutes. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, for example, said the tariff rates would snap back to “exactly where they were” before the high court’s decision.
Meanwhile, the administration’s Section 122 duties, which covered global trade with 10 percent duties for 150 days, expired Friday—the same day the Section 301 duties were imposed.
And as with the IEEPA duties before them, Liberty Justice Center lawyers argued the central truth that the authority to impose taxes and regulate foreign commerce rests with Congress. Congress can authorize the president to take action, but the president must do so within the established boundaries.
“For the third time, the executive branch has taken a limited tariff authority and attempted to stretch it into a worldwide taxing power,” said Jeffrey Schwab, senior counsel and director of litigation at the Liberty Justice Center.
“Changing the statute does not change the law. The Constitution gives the power to impose tariffs to Congress, and when Congress authorizes the executive branch to act, the administration must obey the limits Congress imposed,” he added. “We will continue fighting for American businesses and consumers—and for the separation of powers—each time the government attempts to evade those limits.”
Lawyers for Learning Resources, which filed suit alongside toy company Hand2Mind, HMTX Industries LLC, Halstead New England Corporation, Metroflor Corporation, Shannon Specialty Floors LLC, and ShopHMTX LLC, echoed the complaint in their filing.
“This action challenges the Administration’s third attempt—under a third proffered statutory authority, after the first two attempts were held invalid—to impose essentially the same set of sweeping global tariffs on virtually all imports into the United States,” they wrote. “The third time’s not the charm.”
